In the past, most "C" fold paper products such as facial tissue and the like have been folded, interleaved and stacked on multiple unwind machines which involved unwinding the same number of rolls of tissue or other material as the number of products in the individual box or container. For example, if a 200 count box of tissue was required, 200 rolls of tissue were unwound, folded and progressively placed on top of each other and were then cut to an appropriate size. This type of machine has a large, high speed output potential but requires many people to operate, a large capital investment, a large floor space requirement, and a logistics problem for mixing cases of product with different colored boxes or containers of finished product.
Some examples of this type of machine include U.S. Pat. No. 3,536,317 to Billett; U.S. Pat. No. 3,980,289 to Harin; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,290,592 to Kastner.
Other machines have been provided for stacking a plurality of articles in either vertical or horizontal stacks prior to or as a function of a packaging or boxing operation such as shown by U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,283,973 and 4,285,621 to Spencer, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,325,475 to Spalding.